From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,a9bbfb8cd49f1a51 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!news.glorb.com!newscon02.news.prodigy.com!prodigy.net!cyclone.swbell.net!bos-service1.raytheon.com!dfw-service2.ext.ray.com.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Jeffrey Carter User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (Windows/20050711) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Isn't this in favour of Ada?? References: <42d64dde$0$64794$edfadb0f@dread12.news.tele.dk> <1121352985.715265.125490@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <42e0a08e$0$72206$edfadb0f@dread12.news.tele.dk> In-Reply-To: <42e0a08e$0$72206$edfadb0f@dread12.news.tele.dk> Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------090306000806050806020000" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 08:49:48 -0700 NNTP-Posting-Host: 147.24.111.90 X-Complaints-To: news@ext.ray.com X-Trace: dfw-service2.ext.ray.com 1122047389 147.24.111.90 (Fri, 22 Jul 2005 10:49:49 CDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 10:49:49 CDT Organization: Raytheon Company Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:3735 Date: 2005-07-22T08:49:48-07:00 List-Id: This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------090306000806050806020000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Erlo Haugen wrote: >> > But isn't engineering (at its best) supposed to be independent of the > language chosen? Hardly. A bridge is designed to work when constructed of materials with certain characteristics; the design is not independent of the materials. In the SW field, we've been correcting buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in networking code for decades. They're the single most commonly exploited class of error in the code. Yet the people writing networking code in C today are creating new buffer-overflow errors, despite their knowledge of the problem and their desire not to contribute to it. It seems no amount of engineering can overcome the weakness of the material. A SW engineer using C will create better SW than a coder using C, but a SW engineer using Ada will create better SW than a SW engineer using C. There was a posting here just the other day to the effect that no matter how carefully the poster designs his C++ code, he makes errors that he would not have made in Ada. > You have a point, but most software is not like bridges, it's more like > garden houses: if something goes wrong, it is inconvenient, but not > fatal. I do hope that adequate engineering processes are used for > critical software. Unfortunately, I've seen critical SW that is very badly designed, basically taking design techniques that work OK on a student's 300-line program applied to 100s of KLOC of critical code. If there's a ditch, 2 m deep and 2 m wide, on my property between my house and the road, and I want to be able to get my car across it, I can put a couple of beams across and add a roadbed and have a bridge that will serve my purposes. If I need to carry heavy trucks or span the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay, this design technique is not optimum. You can build such a bridge across the Golden Gate. It involves a lot of piers. It will be much more expensive to build than a better suited design, not meet all desirable objectives (we'll have to give up having large ships moving in and out of the bay), but it will carry traffic across the gap. It will be very difficult and expensive to maintain. What we have in SW are a lot of Golden Gate bridges built using design techniques only suitable for much smaller projects. --------------090306000806050806020000 Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=utf-8; name="spam.vcf" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="spam.vcf" begin:vcard fn:Jeffrey Carter n:;Jeffrey Carter email;internet:jeffrey_r_carter-nr [commercial-at] raytheon [period | full stop] com x-mozilla-html:FALSE version:2.1 end:vcard --------------090306000806050806020000--